Sensing and making sense of data knowledge: Everyday epistemologies, practices, and the geographies of digital health
Topics: Digital Geographies
, Feminist Geographies
, Health and Medical
Keywords: data, digital geographies, epistemology, affect, health, Singapore
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 31
Authors:
Siew Ying Shee, Singapore Management University
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Abstract
Engagements with personal digital data are growing in recent years, as many digital technologies offer any interested user the opportunity to track their habits and practices. Yet, such digital data, whilst seemingly objective, are 'always-already political'. Particularly for digital health technologies, data and algorithmic advice tend to be coded through Western biomedical culture and the individualism of Western ethics. Accordingly, this raises critical questions about the implications that digital data have on people’s knowledge, practices, and everyday geographies of health outside the global North, and how such implications are negotiated on the ground. The paper addresses these underexplored questions in response by drawing on diaries and diary-interviews with 22 digital health technology users in Singapore. The findings show that people’s engagements with digital data are necessarily entwined with epistemological tensions, as they constantly position their health engagements between the universalising calculative logics of digital data and the local socio-cultural prescriptions of health and nutrition. These epistemological tensions are often intensely sensed, prompting varied affective responses of empowerment, shame, and frustration. Yet, negotiating these digital data in turn helps to open up possibilities for engendering new spatiotemporal patterns of exercising and eating. In sum, the paper aims to add critical insights into the underexplored cultures of participation that mediate differences in digital practices across a variety of socio-cultural contexts. Doing so could yield a more culturally situated understanding of the transformative potential and limits that digital technologies have on shaping people's everyday health geographies beyond the dominant focus on Anglo-American experiences.
Sensing and making sense of data knowledge: Everyday epistemologies, practices, and the geographies of digital health
Category
Virtual Paper Abstract
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